Comment by firekvz
5 years ago
As a non-russia customer, I am inmediatly moving all of my domains I host at namecheap to another provider.
this kind of stuff from private companies are useless, and downvote me all you want, they do not work, and dont come to lecture me from your SF desk while im living in a sanctioned country, how did the 2017-2019 sactions for Venezuela worked? Everyone in the world moved on and even forgot about our country, and the comunist regime is more alive than ever, all the sactions just fucked the regular people like me, for example my gf is still explaining after 2 years to those idiots at transferwise support that her money sitting on their super awesome "no borders account" has nothing to do with the venezuelan govt and that it's from her US based remote job but they just decided to steal over 22k USD from her solely based on her citizenship. Or should I tell you how stripe completely killed my friend's startup by suspending their accout because they had venezuelans IPs and venezuelan citizenship and aparently they aren't able to check that they (normal citizens) arent the people on the OFAC list, (like 5 names LOL)
So yeah, dont mind me, get your likes, get all the nice advertisiment you want while prettending you are helping and is nothing more than a PR move while messing with normal people with normal lives, struggling everyday but you won't get me as a customer anymore, we are all suppose to be professionals at our tech jobs.
You inadvertently argued against your own point. Your friend's startup died, that damages the economy, that is what economic sanctions are designed to do. Whether the specific instance of sanctioning was justified is another matter of course, but the point is that the economy was damaged. That hurts ordinary people yes, but - this is a war. Better an economic hit than being bombed or shot.
> that is what economic sanctions are designed to do
Agreed - that is the point. To hurt ordinary people so that they care (not said lightly). Sanctions are designed to punish a whole country.
While messed up, you can't just affect/punish the leadership. If you could we would already be doing that. The way to hurt the leaders is to hurt the ordinary people such that they vote, rise up, etc against the governmental actions.
Russia's ruble has dropped up to 40%+ because of the sanctions and the people are pulling their money in droves. This puts huge pressure on Putin to rethink what he's doing by making it incredibly expensive to wage this war.
> That hurts ordinary people yes, but - this is a war. Better an economic hit than being bombed or shot.
40,000+ people died in Venezuela because of sanctions.
[0]: https://cepr.net/press-release/report-finds-us-sanctions-on-...
This is an super exaggerated number to attributte only to sactions, our TOTALITARIAN REGIME actions killed those people and the reality is that sanctions just helped them
Before the sanctions, (that started in 2015), we had already huge economical problems (and problems of kinds), mainly due the goverment focusing on making one of the greatest corruption acts of all times [1] and focusing on systematically making the venezuelan population poorer, sicker, hungrier and dependant, in order to keep the power and keep stealing money.
The thing is, sanctions did absolutelly NOTHING in favour of venezuelans citizens and their freedom, in fact, they made it easier for the Venezuelan totalitarian regime to justificate their acts (forcing hunger, violating human rights [2], etc) and made it stronger in a way that since our country got alienated, we got more support from other totalirian regimes such as China and Rusia.
So hurting the ordinary people, as that post say, was just putting an extra nail to the coffin of every venezuelan that died of hunger and sickness.. Was just encouraging more people to fight for freedoom with rocks vs guns and died or got detained [3] [4]...
All for nothing, and 6 years later, over 300billions usd stolen later, 2.000.000% hyperinflation later, 7.000.000 venezuelans gone later, over 400 people killed in protest later, over 5,000 political detentions later, the govt is still there and... blocking venezuelans from using stripe, transferwise, etc, is going to help us haha ..
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_in_Venezuela
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Venezuela
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venezuelan_protests_(2014%E2%8...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Venezuelan_protests
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So you want NATO to start bombing Russia, or...?
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> that damages the economy, that is what economic sanctions are designed to do
They're designed to cause regime change, or at least diplomatic changes. That has failed in Venezuela's case (and Cuba's, and North Korea's, and Iran's, and so on).
What's funny (actually, it's very sad) is that any sanctions strong enough to truly harm Russia would destroy the stability of the world's financial system by triggering a global liquidity crisis; we would see a repeat of 2008 (likely worse due to some factors having changed since then). Be careful what you wish for, as those who virtue signal naively today, thinking it'll only affect citizens in faraway lands, may themselves face frozen ATMs, credit cards, and bank transfers in a few months, if the worst-case (i.e. their dream scenario) occurs.
"any sanctions strong enough to truly harm Russia would destroy the stability of the world's financial system by triggering a global liquidity crisis"
You'd need to back this up with some real evidence for it to be convincing.
As it stands right now the freezing of Russian reserves is in effect and international markets are essentially untouched, what are these additional sanctions you are referring to?
I am not an expert in this area but is seems to me that if Russia disappeared from the financial system, with an annual GDP of 1.4 trillion, nobody would really notice after the initial write-downs. It is one tenth of China, and has been chasing away FDI for over a decade - thus reducing its international impact. But I am open to explanations as to why this is a big deal, let me know!
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Not really, his point is that sanctions do more harm to regular people. Kenya right now is the only country pointing out how this will cause a humanitarian crisis, because they know what that looks like. We should stand together against autocratic imperialists regimes, sanctions should be targeted at the regime and russian oligarchs
https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/customary-ihl/eng/docindex/v1...
They have employees in Kharkiv.
If I had employees in a city being bombed out, I'd probably stop doing business with/within the entity doing the bombing, too.
It's not a PR move. If my arm is being injured, I move to protect it. I'm sure you would, too.
>It's not a PR move. If my arm is being injured, I move to protect it. I'm sure you would, too.
Stop doing business with Russians who have no power over Putin is not really "mov[ing] to protect" an injured arm. It's more like an angry wail. Which, fair enough. It's a perfectly understandable desire. I'd probably feel the same way if I were a Namecheap employee in Ukraine. But it doesn't really do anything to protect Ukraine's interests.
They are choosing to stop doing business with the country dropping bombs on their employees and their homes. I didn’t read any grandstanding into it, just an expression of moral obligation toward their employees.
That’s about as cut and dried as it gets.
I think people on this board get very much caught up in the business aspect and fail to see the human side that is driving these actions.
Very well said - the context here is key.
I don't think it's a PR move. The company has many Ukrainian employees, and those people are understandably angry now, and want to lash out at something to do with Russia; so they found a target within their reach. It's still a bad idea because it doesn't actually help anything except Russian propaganda, but I can see where they are coming from.
I wouldn't be surprised if someone said that there are more tech companies with Ukrainian employees than there aren't. Ukrainians are very educated (they keep studying to avoid being forced to join in the military) and since there's not much happening in Ukraine when it comes to employment, they move out to work elsewhere.
That's no excuse to do stupid shit.
Namecheap is entitled to terminate its business relationship with RU entities, just as you are entitled to do the same with Namecheap.
I, for one, will be moving my own personal domain to Namecheap at next renewal. This is a political issue, and I am on the side of sanctioning the invader.
He’s right. It just ends up hurting regular folks.
Putin and friends are doing just fine under sanctions. They expected sanctions for a long time.
This effectively does nothing except make the lives of the non invaders harder.
If you actually want to help Ukraine pick up a gun and go fight.
It’s the regular folks who could wake up from their comfy lethargy and actually protest their government.
Yes, economic sanctions have limited potential to actually topple a totalitarian leadership. With Russia, the concern goes deeper. This country is armed to the teeth and poses a massive threat to Europe. Hence, the point of these sanctions is very much to also weaken the Russian economy and curb its capacity to finance more wars.
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>If you actually want to help Ukraine pick up a gun and go fight.
Killing people is better than inconveniencing regular folks?
Even if you were of that opinion and if namecheap ceo were to do that, it would most likely have less of an effect than what he just did.
I'm Russian. My mother is 78 and her life depends on regular supply of imported medical drugs. If the supply supplies stop due to sanctions, agree dies in 7 days max.
She was opposing Putin's power with everything at her disposal. So 'sanctioning the invader' will kill her.
Sanctioning namecheap users will not hurt Putin at the slightest. It will hurt people who are opposing him, so instead of protesting Putin - and IT people are the most of protesting group of Russians - they'll have to worry about their projects and having food. Good job, namecheap and their supporters.
I won't be trusting namecheap ever again after this. Also, targeting groups of people by their nationality, without individual guilt is something that fascists do.
I'm not from Russia but moved my domain from namecheap to gandi. I saw a lot of people here and on Twitter complain that they got the termination email but have nothing to do with Russia. Now I pay 2 more Euros per year but I have peace of mind that the domain I use for my main email won't get shutdown because I fall into hastily setup filters, atleast I hope so.
Let me know how many domains you’re transferring out of Namecheap so that I can transfer that many back in. For everyone upset about this decision, there will be 100s who applaud it.
And for every 100 that applaud this performative virtue signaling nonsense, there will be 1000 that will see through it.
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The point is to mess with Russian lives so they don’t put up with Putin as their ruler and world destroyer. Any way we can put pain on the Russians right now that doesn’t include nuclear war is better then the alternative.
As a russian who is going to move from NC - you are being very unproductive at least.
The russians who are using nc's services are mainly the ones who are protesting actively and who are concerned about their privacy for this reason.
Quite often NC is (was?) used to host email domains and such. This decision hurts people who are already anti-war and anti-government. Most of Putins supporters never even heard about Namecheap.
On the one hand, sanctions are bad because they often harm citizens of the targeted regime than they do the leadership they're meant to influence. Any right-thinking person should sympathize with the toll that they have on ordinary people.
On the other hand, sanctions are believed to work -- at least in the long term -- precisely because of this effect. The (usually unspoken) theory is that eventually the people won't be able to bear the impact on their day-to-day lives and will rise up and overthrow their leadership. Hopefully Venezuelans, like Russians, will eventually do just this.
These idiots are doing it so that they get free publicity for doing stupid shit like this.
I will be moving my domains to epik.com
as will I
Any recommendations anybody?